The Abominable Snow Mobster

Hello there!
I'm English Mobster, new to TF2 mapping, but not-so-new to mapping itself.
As it were, I have been making maps in some capacity since 2005 for Halo: Custom Edition.
Among the maps I've had a hand in are Archive, Gridlock, and Domain. I was also the lead developer of the Star Wars Total Conversion.
I did some independent work on "Star Wars: Empire at War" and I dabbled with "Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy", but neither of those got too far.
Since, I've been playing a lot of competitive Pokemon (yes, I know) and Minecraft, but haven't had the mapping bug bite me again until recently, when I dusted off Gridlock and decided to try and convert it to TF2 in my first TF2 map, pl_Dockyard.
Anywhom, I hail from Southern California and I'm a history major currently attending college. I look forward to mapping and testing with you all!

Why, thank you.
Personally, I was never good at Halo, I'm still not, but I spent a long time making maps for it. The engine was a harsh and unforgiving mistress, punishing the slightest hole or intersection in your geometry with a cascade of cryptic error messages and a confusing debugger.
However, while it wasn't as noob-friendly as Hammer, it allowed for MUCH better detail work, since it relied upon old-fashioned vertex modeling for the BSP rather than brush-based modeling like in Source or Unreal. That meant that each vertex had to be lovingly hand-crafted, making the map take a very long time to get sealed and ingame (you couldn't even get it out of 3DS Max until it was 100% sealed without intersecting geometry), but that just meant that you could add the tiniest details that would be impractical in Hammer.
After one finally managed to get the BSP out of 3DS Max and through "tool" (a command-line based compiler), you set up your sky in a program called "Guerrilla" before running lightmaps in "Sapien".
Lightmaps would take about 8 hours on a good computer for your average build, inching closer to 12-15 if you go for quality. Each time your BSP was changed, you had to run lightmaps again.
Sapien was the closest thing we had to Hammer, sharing similar controls, but the only view was your 3D view, making things more difficult.
All in all, while it's easier to make things in TF2, the nature of Hammer makes it harder to make good things. Then again, I am but a learner, so...